


Paint the Sky With Stars

by Callie



Series: Now Comes the Night [3]
Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Reality, Dreams, Established Relationship, F/M, Out of the Blue, Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-20 17:46:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie/pseuds/Callie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Magnus are neighbors-with-benefits in the suburbs, but they realize their lives are completely wrong. AU for 3. 19, "Out of the Blue".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paint the Sky With Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third part of a series that begins with an AU of 3.18, "Carentan", called "Now Comes the Night". If you haven't read that, you may want to backtrack!
> 
> Thanks to technosagery and cerie for cheerleading and handolding!

Will swats at his face in response to something wet and scratchy, and he gets an irritated _meow_ in return. "Henry," he mutters, sitting up and scratching the cat behind the ears. "You really have to stop waking me up like this." Henry purrs, butting his head against Will's hand, then leaps off the bed and trots down the hall, presumably downstairs in the hope of treats.

The other side of the bed is empty. Will rubs at his eyes, puts his glasses on and then his clothes, and wanders downstairs. Helen's already awake and has been for some time, judging by the progress she's made on her painting since last night. It's a nightscape, and it's new for her, or at least Will thinks it is. He hasn't seen all her work, only the bits and pieces she's let him see.

He makes sure he's in her line of sight before he speaks. Helen gets lost in her painting sometimes, and he startled her once, making her ruin a piece she'd been working on for some time. He doesn't want to do that again. "Hey," he says quietly. "You're up early."

"Couldn't sleep," she says, brush moving easily over the canvas. "Too many ideas."

Will isn't sure if that's a good thing or not. The ideas, yes, the lack of sleep, not so much. "I'll make some coffee," he says. "Want some?"

"Yes, thank you." She squirts paint onto her palette from battered little tubes and mixes them until she's made a rich, dark blue that's almost black, while Will scoops coffee into the machine and adds water. "I thought you might sleep in, since it's the weekend," she adds.

Will shakes his head. "My mom's car is doing that thing again," he says. "I promised her I'd take a look at it this morning. I don't think wallowing in your bed will pass for an excuse, even if your sheets are better than mine."

"Your sheets are horrendous," Helen informs him, and applies the dark paint to the canvas in thick strokes. "A grown man with his own practice should not have sheets better suited for a college dormitory."

"It just gives me an excuse to come over and try out yours," he teases, and when the coffee's done he pours it into two big mugs. He likes lots of sugar and cream, but Helen takes hers with one spoonful of sugar and nothing else. He puts her mug on the little table near her easel and sips at his while he watches her paint a little. It's only recently that she's allowed him to watch her at work. Each time she lets him, he feels privileged to see something that seems so personal, so he tries not to gawk too much.

Helen works in silence for a little while. Will has learned not to take this personally, even though he's not used to this much quiet. It's not that she's ignoring him, it's just that she focuses so intently on what she's doing that she doesn't have the energy for conversation. (Or at least that's what he thinks. They haven't done this long enough for him to really be sure about anything.)

After a bit he finishes his coffee and rinses out his mug. Helen's still painting, and she seems to be in a groove that won't finish anytime soon. It's good, he thinks. She's had a dry spell, so inspiration and motivation is probably good for her. "I'm going to go work on her car," he says. "See you later?"

"You should come for dinner," she says. "Ashley's visiting for the weekend. I'd like you to meet her."

Will starts to say something really inane, like _I've already met her_ \--but he hasn't, he's only seen the framed pictures that top the fireplace mantel and the few flat surfaces that aren't covered in buckets of paintbrushes or plastic bins full of half-used tubes of paint--so instead he says, "Sure, I'd love to," and wonders what made him want to say anything else.

 

*****

He's elbow-deep under the hood of his mother's car when he sees it the first time. A glowing blue shape, like the number eight, in long, sideways strings. Will blinks and shakes his head and blinks and then it's gone.

"Will?"

 _Will, stay where you are._

He shakes his head again to clear it and comes out from under the hood of the car, blinking in the sunlight. His mom's standing there, frowning a little in the way she does when she's worried about something (usually him). "Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah, sure," he says, flashing her a bright smile. "Just daydreaming, that's all."

"You drifted away for a minute there." She reaches up to ruffle his hair a little, the way she did when he was a kid, then peers under the hood of the car, squinting. Really, she needs glasses, but she's stubborn and won't get them because she says bifocals are for old ladies and she is anything but. "What's wrong with the car?"

"I don't know," he says. "Honestly, Mom, I don't know why you don't just let my mechanic take a look at it. I'm a cardiologist, I don't know anything about cars."

"And miss all this quality time with you?" She's smiling, and Will knows she's teasing, but there's truth to it too, truth that stings; he's been so busy lately, between work and his new relationship with Helen, that he's neglected her a little. It's as close as she'll get to scolding him.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"It's all right," she says, and there's nothing passive-aggressive about it, not the way he hears in the exchanges between some of his patients and their parents or adult children. When she says it's all right, it really is.

"I'm having dinner at Helen's tonight," he says, "but tomorrow, why don't we go out? There's a new Italian place in town I haven't tried yet."

"I can cook," she offers.

Will shakes his head. "I don't want you to go to any trouble," he says. "My treat." He missed her birthday two weeks ago because he had an emergency at the hospital, and he wants to make it up to her.

"All right," she relents. Will turns back to the car and fiddles with a wire here and there, and eventually his mother says, "So, dinner at Helen's tonight?"

"Yeah. Her daughter's in town and she wants me to meet her."

"Meeting the family," his mother observes. "Must be serious?"

"Helen's met _you_ ," he points out.

"Helen's my neighbor," she replies. "I met her before you did. I don't think that counts."

This was true. Henry had wandered into Will's mother's yard and dug up the bulbs she'd planted last fall, just after Will moved in next door; when she took him back across the street to Helen, they ended up standing in the yard talking for an hour and trading gardening tips. "I guess not," he allows, and wonders if this is at all weird. If it is, he doesn't care. His mother and his ex-wife hadn't gotten along well at all, and it was tiresome.

He fiddles with the car a little more until it's clear he's not going to get to the bottom of the problem. He's disappointed, which is weird, because he doesn't even like working on cars, but he supposes it's because she wanted him to fix it, and he likes making her happy. She agrees to let him call the mechanic for her on Monday, and in the meantime he'll take her wherever she needs to go. But now he's covered in grease and has to get presentable for dinner.

*****

He isn't quite sure what to make of Ashley, when he meets her. She sizes Will up with one thorough look, and he wonders if he's passed her test of acceptability. She seems harsh, to Will; her voice is as blunt as the cut of her straight blonde hair and she's filled with pent-up energy that he guesses must have come from her father, not Helen. (She's studying to be a lawyer, like her father.) But her devotion to her mother is clear, and whatever she thinks of Will, she keeps it to herself, making mostly-pleasant conversation through dinner and lingering over coffee afterward.

"How's the painting going, Mom?" she asks, and nods toward the living room that usually serves as Helen's studio. It's emptier now than it was earlier today, and Will thinks it's because she put things away in anticipation of Ashley's visit, but a look crosses Helen's face that makes him wonder if he's wrong about that.

"All right," she says, and rises to clear things from the table.

Ashley waits until Helen is out of earshot, then says in a low voice, "That usually means 'it sucks'."

Will frowns. "She was just painting this morning," he says, "and things seemed to be going fine."

Ashley looks at him in a way that says _I don't want to know about you being here in the morning_ , but she doesn't actually say it. "So, where's the painting?"

Will doesn't know and he can't elaborate, because Helen's back with more coffee and some kind of cake that's a heavenly combination of bananas and chocolate and whatever it was that bothered her earlier seems to be gone. He eats his cake, going on about how good it is enough that Helen looks pleased, and he gets the feeling she likes cooking almost as much as painting, but never has the time or occasion to do it. She's good enough at it that it's an art, really, and he has another piece while Ashley tells a story about something that happened when she was a kid.

 _"Mom, do you remember the summer I turned eighteen? We drew an entire den of werewolves. You know, as in bag and capture... sedate... catalog... it wasn't just me, Mom was there too, and some locals, one who seriously looked like Adrian Brody."_

 _"Ashley."_

 _"Mom, you thought he was hot too."_

Will chokes on his coffee and both women look at him while he hacks and coughs. "Are you all right?" Helen asks, patting him on the back.

"Yeah," he manages. "I just, um. Sorry. Got a little too into this cake here, went down the wrong way." No way were they having the conversation he thinks they had, but he heard it as clearly as if they did.

He finishes his cake and coffee without choking on it and wonders if he just hallucinated that conversation. Maybe he did, because the rest of Ashley's stories have to do with things like _remember that time I crashed my motorcycle?_ and _oh yeah, that time I feel out of the treehouse when we lived over on Worth Street?_ , perfectly normal crazy-things-that-happened-when-I-was-a-kid stories that had nothing to do with capturing and cataloging werewolves.

*****

 _That night Will dreams of things that make no sense. It's wet and warm and a little like swimming, except swimming doesn't happen in a lab and it doesn't happen with people holding you down, yelling at you not to fight it. It's more like drowning. He fights the fog that clouds his brain, fights_ them _as hard as he can, but in the end it's the drugs that get him. He sinks lower in the water, not enough to drown but enough to sleep_

and he wakes up, tugging at the sheets like they're choking him. His room is quiet and dark and he wonders what the hell he's doing. It's just a stupid dream. Will gets up and goes to the bathroom, pours a glass of water from the tap, and drinks it in a couple of gulps. The digital clock by the bed displays _1:15_ in big blue numbers. The blue bothers him, because it's the blue of the loopy 8s that popped up in front of him while he was working on his mother's car, so he yanks the plug from the wall and the clock goes dark.

The curtains are open. He was tired enough when he went to sleep that he didn't close them, and he can see Helen's house across the street. This time of night he thinks she might be asleep--she usually is, when he's spending the night--but she's awake, every light on the lower floor blazing bright while she paints. The canvas is angled away from him, so he can't see what she's working on, but he can see enough of _her_ to know she isn't happy with what she's painting.

She looks almost afraid.

 

*****

In the morning, Will goes for a run, and when he circles around the block the third time he swings into Helen's walkway instead of his own. He wants to talk to her, though he's not completely sure what he'll say. He just knows he needs to figure out a way to tell if he's going nuts or not, and he didn't like seeing Helen with that look on her face and he wants to be sure she's okay.

Her car is still parked in the driveway, so he knocks lightly on the door. There's no answer, so he goes around back because he knows sometimes she likes to sit in her garden and drink her coffee or read, if she's in the mood. There's no Helen and no Ashley in the back yard, either, but there are paintings. Helen's paintings, all the nightscapes she's been working on--pale twilights and brilliant sunsets and rich, velvety midnights, now streaked with vivid blue loops and 8s linked together--are stacked carelessly against the side of the house between the trash cans and the recycling bins. He sucks in a breath and kneels in front of the stacked canvases, carefully flipping through each one.

Helen's been painting what he's been dreaming.

This is a relief, in a way, because it confirms he's not going nuts, but it scares the shit out of him, too, because it makes no sense. It's some crazy psycho mumbo-jumbo about collective consciousness or some other touchy-feely crap that he avoided in medical school for hard, objective science, and he doesn't know what to do with it. But he does know what to do with the paintings. There's an overall pattern there that he recognizes immediately, and he gathers up all the canvases and hauls them across the street to his house.

There's a power drill in the garage. He leans the canvases against the empty fireplace and goes out to get it. The canvases are pieces of a puzzle and he uses the drill to fasten them together until the whole thing takes up one entire wall of his living room. They aren't 8s, he realizes. They're infinity symbols, stretched out in long twisted rows across the paintings, and they look exactly like what he's been seeing, floating around the edges of his consciousness.

He has no fucking idea what this means.

He leaves the paintings on the wall and goes upstairs to shower. It takes forever, because he _sees_ things, fragments of things and people that make no sense--Helen with a gun, creatures with claws and scales and teeth, a dark haired girl who disappears into nothing in front of his eyes, fields of wheat and the sensation of falling and falling and falling--and he wonders if he's not going crazy after all.

When he comes back downstairs, his mother is standing in the living room staring at the paintings.

"Will," she says. She's worried. "We were supposed to meet two hours ago to go to lunch. Is something wrong?"

"I don't know," he says, and gestures at the paintings. "They're Helen's. She was thowing them out, so I just..." It's not an explanation, he knows; no matter how many times you've slept with someone, going through their trash is not really an okay thing to do. "This symbol here, it's like a puzzle--a pattern--see how it goes across all the paintings like that?"

"I see," she says. It's not nearly as fascinating to her as it is to him, and he figures it's because she's still sane and he's not.

"It means something," Will tries to explain. "This pattern, it _means_ something, if I can just figure it out." Which is not an explanation, either, but it's all he's got.

"Okay. Will... listen." She looks at Helen's paintings again and then turns to look at him, putting her hands on his shoulders. This is a reach for her, because she's tiny and he outgrew her when he was still in elementary school, but she does it anyway. "I think you've been working too hard. You've been under a lot of pressure, and I think you really just need to relax. Maybe take up yoga or meditation or just... take a day off."

Will pulls off his glasses and rubs his hand over his face. "No," he says. "I don't think that's it. I think... I think something feels wrong. Something about my _life_ feels wrong and I can't put my finger on what it is."

She shakes her head a little. "You're a little too young for a midlife crisis," she says gently. "Maybe you haven't really worked out your feelings about the divorce."

"Oh, I've worked them out," he replies. He's been past that for some time. "I don't think this has anything to do with Abby, or work, or-- I don't know. I just know, if I can think about this, I can figure it out. I know I can." It feels like there's an answer to all this just out of his reach, and he can't quite find it, or it's there and something's stopping him from reaching it.

His mother squeezes his shoulders and lets go, offering him a small, patient smile. "For now, why don't we just go to lunch?"

"Yeah, okay." Will's been so wrapped up in his fears of going nuts that he forgot about lunch--lunch he promised her to make up for the birthday he missed two weeks ago. He takes another look at the paintings and then turns away to find his keys and wallet. "I'll drive."

They go out to the car and Will's just opened the door to get in, but his mother's still standing there by the car door like she's not sure if she wants to get in. "Changed your mind?" he asks, joking, and then he sees her face and his stomach drops.

"Mom?"

He goes around to her side of the car and she's moving her mouth like she's trying to make words but she can't find them while she stares at the handle of the car door.

"Mom, what's wrong? Talk to me."

She blinks, slowly, and she sways a little; Will's arms go around her and she slumps a little like she's forgotten how to stand up properly. He eases her to the sidewalk and while he wants to freak the fuck out, somehow he manages not to and pulls his phone from his pocket instead to call 911. He's giving the dispatcher their location when he sees Helen running across the road towards them.

"What happened?" she asks, kneeling beside them.

Will finishes the call and shoves the phone back in his pocket. "She just collapsed," he says, sounding way less frantic than he feels. "We were just going to lunch, and she stopped talking and just stood there and then--"

"All right," Helen says, calm and collected in a way Will's never seen before. She's checking his mom's pulse and looking into her eyes and doing the things that Will knows, somewhere, he should have thought to do himself, but didn't out of sheer panic. His mom is still trying to speak, but Helen soothes her and tells her to just be calm, relax, don't move, it will be all right. "I think you've had a stroke," she says, and tries to help Will make her more comfortable. "There's an ambulance on the way, but until it arrives you need to stay still and try to stay calm and we're going to be right here with you, I promise."

Will's never been this terrified in his life, and his mom looks as scared as he feels, but he holds her hand and tells her it will be okay and that he loves her. He squeezes her hand and she doesn't (can't?) squeeze back and something cold and ugly coils in his stomach because she's been the one constant in his whole entire life, through his father leaving and his stupid teenage rebellion and all the craziness of college and his messed-up relationship and eventual divorce from Abby, and he has absolutely no idea what he'd do if she wasn't there.

Helen stays with them until the ambulance comes, and he's never been more grateful.

 

*****

Will stays at the hospital with his mother for the rest of the day. It's strange to be there on the other side of the fence, as the patient's family, not the patient's doctor, and everything looks different from this perspective. She improves somewhat through the day, to Will's immense relief, and the tentative diagnosis is that it wasn't a stroke but a transient ischemic attack, though further tests and observation are warranted and it's decided she should stay overnight.

"I'm fine, Will," she tells him. It takes her a little effort to speak, but mostly she just sounds tired. She _looks_ tired, and vulnerable, in her hospital bed, and it unnerves him. Her skin is more pale than it should be. "You should go home and get some rest."

"I'll stay with you," he says.

"I'm in good hands," she tells him. "And you have to work tomorrow."

Both of these things are true, but Will hesitates. "I don't want to leave you here alone."

"I won't sleep a wink with you hovering," she points out, with a hint of both teasing and chiding. "I'm sure they'll let me come home tomorrow and then you can hover all you want."

They go back and forth on this a little, but in the end Will gives in. He leaves a kiss in her hair and goes to see who's on rotation for overnight--he's not above letting them know it's _his mother_ in there, damn it--and finally convinces himself to go home.

He parks the car, but doesn't go inside. Instead he walks across to Helen's. It's kind of late, he knows, but he hopes she's not asleep.

She's not. She opens the door and lets him in. "How is your mother?"

"She's okay," he says, and Helen's shoulders slump a little with relief. "You were right about the stroke. It was a mini-stroke, a transient ischemic attack. She's talking now, and regained her motor function, so they think she'll be okay. They wanted to keep her overnight for observation."

"That's probably wise." Helen hesitates, then adds, "You're welcome to stay tonight, if you'd like. Ashley left this afternoon."

Will's glad for the offer. He's exhausted to the point that just walking across the street seems like more effort than he's willing to put forth. Helen puts away her paints and brushes from her evening's work, and Will looks at her newest painting resting on the easel. There are no twisted blue symbols in this muted night sky she's painted, but if he tilts his head just the right way, the tiny stars she's painted there have a definite pattern.

He doesn't need her to connect the dots with great blue slashes to recognize it.

"Come to bed," she says, taking his hand. He sees the twisted blue symbols at the edge of his vision but he ignores them, because he doesn't want her to know he's slowly going crazy. Helen feels like the only part of his life that makes any sense lately, and he needs what they have together to stay untouched by his growing insanity.

So when they fall into her bed, he's more desperate than usual, a little more clumsy--he wants something to ground him, and he thinks she's the only one that can do it. She seems different, too, though, more determined, and when she slides on top of him she makes a sound that's edged with frustration and she grinds against him, hard. Of all the things that have felt wrong about his life lately, this does not. This feels right, and good, and he thinks that maybe as long as they're doing this, he doesn't have to think about anything else. There's nothing but her then, the way she's on him and around him, it's all her.

Helen sits up a little and her hands cup her breasts; she seems turned into herself, like he's not quite there, and somehow Will finds that almost unbearably erotic. He admires her in the pale light that filters through the curtains. She drops her head a little, concentrating, and her hair falls around her face as her hands slide lower down her body. "Will," she whispers, shivering, and he steadies her, gripping her hips while she touches herself. Her thighs tense and relax, her body rising and falling with a rhythm that threatens to drag him under, and she pushes her fingers harder, faster, working herself mercilessly until she comes hard and fast.

She doesn't take the time to enjoy the aftermath. He's still inside her, and she rocks against him hard enough that he can almost feel her hipbones against his. It doesn't stop her and neither can Will, and he doesn't want to. He needs release. She whimpers a little, frustrated, and he rolls them over so he can push her thighs further apart

 _deeper, we have to go deeper_

and God, it feels so good. Helen's fingernails dig into his back, urging him on, and he pushes harder, faster. When his orgasm hits him, he lets it drag him under for a minute until he remembers how to breathe again. It's Helen that pulls him out of that haze, kissing him, moving under him, clearly not satisfied with what they've done.

Her face is wet.

"I'm sorry," he says, and tries to pull away, thinking he's hurt her with his desperation, but she tightens her legs around him and won't let go.

"No," she says. "Please. I need this."

Will can't say no to her. He feels like he could never say no to her, no matter what it is--he'd do anything she asked

 _you have to die_

no matter what it was. He eases his weight off her; once she realizes he isn't pulling away, just beside her, she relaxes her grip on him a little, and when he pulls her close she kisses him, all salt and hot and need. She presses against his thigh and he works his hand between them, giving her what she wants; she pants and digs her fingers into his arm and comes again, though it seems like it doesn't give her what she's looking for.

"Helen," he says, and she turns away, rolling on her side away from him. He doesn't let her get too far, spooning behind her, wrapping his arm around her. Helen stiffens a little and then relaxes somewhat, pushes back against him, fitting them more closely together.

"I don't want to talk about it," she says miserably.

"Then we won't," Will says, because he doesn't want to talk about it either.

 

*****

 _Will dreams of the lab again. He fights as hard as he can when he gets there--he almost makes it out of the tank, almost on his own two feet, and then he's pushed back by many, many hands, shoved into a tank, a box, a water-filled coffin. He fights and shoves, gulps in air and chokes on water and he sees Helen's there, too, in a box like his, but she's not fighting, she's sleeping, maybe dead_

not dead, he knows what she looks like dead, he's killed her once

 _and he has to get to her, but there are drugs again, and they're pulling him down, down into the dark of sleep_

and he wakes, gulping in air, shoving at the blankets.

Helen's still asleep beside him, and he's so, _so_ fucking glad, because he doesn't want her to know about this madness he's spiralling into. But he wants to make sure she's asleep, so he touches his fingers to her neck. Her pulse is slow and strong and he breathes a sigh of relief.

But he doesn't go back to sleep.

 

*****

He goes in to work early the next morning and sees his most critical patients and a couple of pre-op appointments, but he has the receptionist reschedule the afternoon so he can bring his mother home from the hospital. She has a couple of prescriptions to fill, so he takes care of that and brings her home.

"I still owe you lunch," he says, and offers to get take-out, but she says she isn't hungry, just tired, and she wants a nap. Will knows no one really gets any sleep in the hospital, so he tries not to hover too much so she can get some rest. It doesn't work very well, because she eventually shoos him away.

"I'm _fine_ , Will," she says. "If something happens, I have my phone and I'll call you, I promise. Please go home and get some rest. You look terrible. I don't think you slept at all last night, did you?"

"Not really," he admits.

She huffs, both triumphant and annoyed. "William Zimmerman, go to your room and take a nap right this minute." They both laugh, because she hasn't called him William since he was eight and broke the dining room window with a baseball.

He makes sure she has a glass of water and her phone and a couple of books and the morning newspaper and the tv remote and enough blankets, because he doesn't want her getting up and down and making herself tired. She clucks at him because he's being a mother hen and he knows it, so he finally stops puttering around and goes home.

Helen's sitting on his front step, wrapped in one of her giant sweaters, this one an earthy mix of greens and blues and browns, twisting her fingers together. "How is your mother?" she asks when he sits down beside her.

"She's okay," he answers. "She's inside, resting. She feels good enough to cluck at me when I'm smothering her, so that's a good sign, right?"

Helen smiles faintly and nods. "About last night," she says, but Will interrupts her and reaches for her hand.

"It's okay," he says. "You don't have to explain."

"Yes, I do." She squeezes his hand, but she doesn't look at him. "I haven't been myself, lately. I've been having all sorts of strange dreams, images I can't make sense of, nightmares I don't understand, of a--"

"--a lab," Will supplies, feeling enormous relief and fresh terror all at once. "Tanks of water."

"Yes," Helen says eagerly, and looks at him now. "That I'm being experimented on."

"And _you're_ there," they both say at once.

Then there's silence, while they think about what that means.

Will pulls off his glasses, rubs at his eyes, and puts his glasses back on again. "Come inside," he says, and helps her up. "There's something I want to show you."

When he shows her the paintings, he half expects her to be pissed that he's gone through her trash, but either she realizes why he did it or it doesn't matter or both, because Helen doesn't say anything right away. She just traces the line of the linked blue symbols across the canvases from one edge to the other, then she turns to him.

"I didn't know what I was painting," she says. "I kept seeing it, and I felt like I had to paint it, but I didn't know what it meant."

"I don't know what it means," Will says. "But it _does_ mean something. I keep seeing it, over and over, and every time I do I feel like something's just--"

"--just not right," Helen finishes. It's spooky, the way they keep doing that, but Will guesses it's not half as spooky as dreaming the same dreams and seeing the same weird symbols floating around out of nowhere.

"Okay," he says. "Hear me out. This is crazy, but I think..." There's an idea forming in his mind, something so utterly bizarre and ridiculous he expects Helen to reject it outright, but he has to get it out. He has to put it out there, because the alternative to this is that he's going crazy. "I think that none of this--"

"--is real."

Encouraged, he goes on. "This life, the things I do everyday, they feel wrong. Not--not _us_ , but everything else. It feels wrong. Like it's a life that belongs to somebody else."

" _Yes._ That's exactly what it feels like."

So he's _not_ crazy, this isn't completely out there after all, and it's a relief and a terror, because what he's talking about is the kind of stuff that just happens in sci-fi movies. "I'm... I'm a cardiologist, but I didn't have the first clue what was wrong with my mom yesterday."

"But I did," Helen says. Her eyes are bright and he knows it's the excitement of solving a problem, conquering a mystery. "And I sit around here all day and paint... and drink coffee. I married a man I hate."

"I don't remember even marrying my ex-wife." He doesn't remember divorcing her, either, and while he doesn't hate Abby the way Helen apparently hates her ex-husband, he can't remember anything about their marriage.

He looks at Helen and thinks hard about what he's going to say next before he says it. "What if this is the dream," he says carefully. "What if all of this, our lives here, is a dream, a construct, and what we're _dreaming_ is actually reality."

"How do we know for sure?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know," he says.

"I have an idea," she replies.

 

*****

"It's for anxiety," Helen says, showing him the bottle. Will nods. He hasn't noticed her taking the pills before, but he's tried not to pry into her business, too. "And sometimes my perception of the laboratory is clearest when I've taken it."

"It's worth a try," he says.

She shakes the pills out into her palm and they wash them down with bottled water from the fridge. "I don't think we should fight it, when we get there," she says. "Just look, and listen, and we'll talk about it later."

"Compare notes?"

"Something like that."

It's a plan, and maybe a crazy one, but it's better than drifting aimlessly like he was before. Like _they_ were before, he corrects himself. They lie down on her bed, facing each other, and she slips her hand into his.

And they wait.

 

*****

 _This time, Will doesn't fight._

 _He just opens his eyes and looks around as much as he can without turning his head. There are lights, banks of them overhead like in an operating theatre, and monitors; there's something on his head, but he doesn't feel an intravenous line. He hears people speaking, their voices distorted through the water, but he can't see anyone until a man leans over them and speaks in a thick accent._

 _"So, how are Thing One and Thing Two doing today?" He leans over and looks at them--them, because Helen's there too, he can see her out of the corner of his eye--and makes notes on a tablet. "I just wish you wouldn't fight it."_

 _There's the pull of drugs again, and he doesn't fight it, because he knows now_

and he wakes up with Helen in her bed. They both sit up, gasping, reorienting themselves, and they look at each other.

"I wish you wouldn't fight it?" she says.

"Thing One and Thing Two?" he says.

"Bloody hell," she replies.

Helen thinks that they need to completely reject this life in order to remain in the laboratory. Will doesn't know how they can really know, how they can be _sure_ which life is real and which life is fake--and when she says _reject this life_ , he knows exactly what she means.

"It's a leap of faith," she says.

Somehow, he knows that everything with Helen is a leap of faith. And he will always, _always_ make the leap.

 

*****

Helen's going to drive. They don't discuss it, they just get in her car and it seems natural that she drives. _She always does_ , he thinks as she cranks the car, and then--

"Mom?"

"Ashley. Oh my God."

"Will? Where are you going?"

His mom is tapping at the window, sweet and concerned and he doesn't know how she got there, because she should be in bed resting.

Ashley shouldn't be there either, she should be back at school, but there she is, tapping on Helen's window and pleading with her to roll it down. "Just talk to me, Mom," she says, and Helen shakes her head, gripping the wheel as hard as she can.

"Will, honey, open the door," his mom says, gentle and patient like always. "Whatever's happened, we can talk about this, just come home. Just get out of the car and come with me."

He can't hear what Ashley's saying, because the sound of his mom's voice--sweet and soothing, even now--is crowding everything else out, though he knows Ashley's saying the same things his mom is saying: _Stop the car, just get out and talk to me, where are you going? I love you. Don't do this. Why are you doing this? I love you._ And Helen's saying the same thing he's saying. _I'm sorry._

Because that's all there is to say.

 _I'm so sorry._

"Will, please stay with me," his mom says. "Don't leave me." She's crying now, and Will wants to cry too because this is just _too fucking much_ , but he can't because there's a cold certainty that's filled him, something that tells him that if this life was real, his mother would not be standing here begging him not to drive off with Helen when she's supposed to be in the house resting--his mother and Helen's daughter standing there saying the same things and trying to keep them here, but they shouldn't be saying anything at all because his mother and Helen's daughter are dead. He doesn't know how he knows this, but he knows it as surely as he knows his name is Will Zimmerman, and he also knows with that same cold certainty that once Magnus--it's Magnus, it's always been Magnus--backs this car out of this driveway he will never see his mother again, Magnus will never see Ashley again, just like they will never see James and Clara and Ravi and Josie and an endless string of other names he knows with faces that are just beyond his reach, they are gone, gone, gone. He will never see his mother again, and even though this isn't the way he wants to remember her--it's not really even her, is it?--he wants to _remember_ her even if nothing about the memories he has of her is actually real, even if she isn't real he wants to remember the sound of her voice and the way that her hand is so much smaller and thinner than his when they're pressed palm to palm with the glass between them, even though when he was a child her hands seemed so much larger and stronger than his. And he knows that if she collapses in this driveway like she did the day before he will not have the strength to leave her lying there if Magnus doesn't get this car moving _right now_.

He puts his hand over Magnus's on the shift and yanks it into reverse.

"Drive, Magnus," he says.

 

*****

This time when they wake up in the tanks, no one stops them, no one pushes them back down. They climb out of the water and their clothes are soggy and cold, but they're on their own feet and everything on the outside feels real, like it should be, even if everything on the inside feels numb.

There's an explanation. There always is. This time it comes from Kate and Henry, and while he's glad it was them and not some kind of psycho criminal experimenting on them in a quest for global domination (which, by this point, wouldn't surprise him), it's still just _weird_ to look at the giant worm in the tank and know that whole life came from the secretions of its salivary glands.

"Psychic worm spit," Will mutters, watching the worm twist and float and glow a brilliant blue in the tank. "Great."

It all comes back to Hollow Earth, of course. But even though he now knows that all of this was caused by the worm screwing with their minds, that whole manufactured life seems more real and more immediate to him than the threat posed by Abnormals escaping from below. At least for now. It's rattled him--and he knows it's rattled Magnus, even if she doesn't show it--and he needs time to let it sink in. They find dry clothes and tea and food--take-out, but Will doesn't care because he's apparently been in that tank for three days and he's starving--and Magnus charters a plane back to Old City. Food and dry clothes go a long way to dragging him firmly back into this reality.

They sleep on the plane. The drug induced sleep they've been in for the last three days was no more restful than being under anesthesia, and it's hit both of them hard. Halfway through the flight he wakes up a little and realizes Magnus's head is leaning on his shoulder and she's sleeping like a rock. Henry looks at them and shrugs, confused but not questioning, and Will just goes back to sleep and thankfully, dreams about absolutely nothing at all.

*****

There's a huge stack of paperwork on his desk when they get home. Will takes one look at the pile and decides it can breed into a million more baby papers for all he cares: he is not going to touch it. Not tonight. He dumps his bag in his room and is on his way to look for Magnus when he turns around and there she is.

He says, "C'mere," and she puts her arms around him and they hold each other right there in the hallway and Will realizes he doesn't really care who sees them. Not right now.

"I'm sorry about your mother," Magnus says quietly. "She was a lovely woman."

"I'm sorry about Ashley," Will says, and he feels her cheek brush against his as she nods. There's a lump in his throat, but somehow it's easier to talk around than he thought it would be. "I know it wasn't really my mom, I know it wasn't really Ashley, but..."

"I know," Magnus says, and Will finds that's all he needs to say about it. He feels wrung out and raw and he knows she does too and he thinks that although it isn't his usual strategy, they just need to leave it alone for now. They've acknowledged it, and it's enough.

After a little while, Magnus lets go of him and sighs. "I've spent three days in a tank full of the secretions of a psychic annelid," she says. "I feel quite disgusting, and would very much like a proper shower."

"Worm spit will do that," he says, grinning.

She huffs. "Charming vernacular. I suspect you could do with a wash as well."

Will takes it for an invitation. They end up in Magnus's bathroom, because hers is approximately twice the size of his, peeling each other's clothes off. It's a slow process, because they're tired, but also because they need a reconnection to each other that's based in this world again and not one that exists solely in their minds. Will learned this lesson after Carentan. He's not eager to repeat that distance now.

They take just as much time in washing as they did with removing their clothes. Will pours shampoo into his palm and massages it into her scalp until she sighs with pleasure, then he lathers her skin--all of it, from behind her ears all the way down between her toes that are still painted a brilliant red. He works the soap into a rich crop of bubbles and works it over her arms, her breasts, between her thighs. Magnus presses against his hand then, and slides her arms around his neck, but he doesn't go further than that yet. Instead he rinses her skin clean, smoothing away all the traces of soap with his hands. She returns the favor, scratching his scalp lightly with her nails when she washes his hair--which feels way better than it should, Will thinks--soaping every inch of his skin in case there are any lingering traces of anything that shouldn't be there.

They don't want to be under the influence of anything except each other.

She rinses away the last of the soap from his skin and drags her fingers over his chest and stomach and lower and he groans when she wraps her hand around him. "Magnus," he warns, because he's too tired for self-control and he won't last long like this. He wants to be inside her so badly he aches, but there are other, more immediate needs than getting out of the shower and finding condoms, like the need to just be close to her. So he presses her against the wall, kissing her neck, sliding his hand between her thighs. He's so close that his rhythm is ragged and uneven, a little clumsy, and she rocks her pelvis against his hand. It's not frantic, but it's intense, and when they finally hit that sweet, blissful release they have to hold onto each other and the wall to keep from falling.

Will wishes he had enough words to tell her exactly what she means to him, but he doesn't, and he thinks he never will. A simple _I love you_ is not enough, not after what they've been through these last few weeks, so he doesn't say it. He kisses her over and over, rinses them clean again, kisses her some more, and eventually they make it out of the shower and dry each other with thick, fluffy towels.

"Can I just wear this?" Will says, wrapping himself in a ridiculously soft towel that he could swear is as big as a sail. It goes around him almost five times. Maybe. He lost count. "Seriously. This is like, all the clothes I need for the rest of my life."

"Cheeky," she says, and reaches under the towel. Will jumps when her fingers brush against still-sensitive skin, and backs up until he hits the bed. Magnus laughs and pushes him onto it, straddling him. Her towel is still wrapped around her, but it rests low across her breasts and it would only take a slight tug to make it fall. Will plays with the edge of her towel, looking up at her.

"I want you to stay," she says.

"I was hoping you would," he says, tugging a little at the towel, but not enough to make it fall.

"No," she says. "I don't just mean tonight. I mean every night."

"Really?" He's kind of surprised by how surprised he is about this. Magnus is the kind of person who needs a certain amount of privacy, a certain amount of personal space.

"Only if it's agreeable to you," she says, and her cheeks are flushed.

Will likes the way she looks with this flush and her damp, tousled hair. "Uh, yeah, it's agreeable," he says. "More than agreeable. Definitely."

"Good." She looks happy.

Will realizes then that he'll do whatever he can to keep her that way.


End file.
